So, you may be happy to know that YouTube offers an alternate way to view its videos that’s optimized for speed.

Basically they strip away a lot of the extra features and other stuff that’s typically found around the videos and optimize the video to limit how much your browser needs to download.

YouTube calls this their Feather project (because it’s designed to make video pages more lightweight).

Although it’s been around for quite some time, Feather is still in Beta. YouTube considers it a “work in progress” and not a final product. So it may not work for every video.

If you want a faster YouTube experience and don’t mind missing some of the extra bells and whistles, visit the Feather Beta page and click the Join link.

After that, whenever you visit a video page that’s been optimized, you’ll see a blue box on the right side of the page that tells you you’re viewing a lightweight version of the video page. You can simply play the optimized video as usual, or click one of the links in the blue box to see the regular (non-optimized) video page Just this once or Permanently.

I have EarthLink DSL Internet service at home with a 1.5Mbps connection, so I don’t need YouTube Feather, but I have enjoyed the optimized videos and faster-loading pages.

We hope you enjoy a faster YouTube experience too. Let us know how it works out for you.

Whether you use DSL, high-speed Cable, or dial-up to connect to the Internet, your Internet connection speed is only one of several factors that can affect the speed of your web browsing, how fast webpages load in your browser. The size of your temporary Internet files, or cache, is also important.

A web browser’s cache is simply a place designated on your computer where the browser temporarily stores webpage information – such as images. When you revisit a webpage, loading these saved page elements from your computer is faster than loading them from the Web. So letting your browser store more temporary Internet files on your computer can make speed up webpages when you revisit them. This is especially noticeable for dial-up Internet users.

Today, we’ll show you how easy it is to increase the size of this Temporary Internet File cache in Internet Explorer, the most popular web browser with EarthLink members.

1. Click the Tools icon (gear icon in upper right on the latest version of IE) and select Internet Options.
2. From the Browsing history section (on the General tab), click the Settings button.
3. Click the radio button next to Automatically and increase the Disc space to use amount to at least 250 MB (more if your computer has lots of space).
4. Click the OK button to save your changes, then OK again to close Internet Options.

Now you’re ready to start browsing.

One more thing to keep in mind: the temporary Internet file cache we just showed you how to increase is also something that you should occasionally clear out (especially if you notice issues loading webpages). We’ll tell you all about that in another post. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: We have a second article outlining how to do this in Firefox HERE!